Loading role vars without executing role

Archives Ansible Project
1

Hello,

A bit of background… I manage multiple applications. Each application has an ansible role defined for it. Sometimes, there is a playbook that is common to each application, but I would prefer to keep this playbook out of the ansible role and instead use the playbook from the parent project (to reduce code duplication); however, I do still need all the vars that are specific to the role in the playbook. Is there a way to load a role, but not have it execute at all? Just so I can reference the role variables? I tried including_vars from roles/<role_name/defaults/main.yml but that does not seem to work. I did get it working by importing the role (my main.yml is a noop unless some flags are set) and that does work, but I’d prefer it if the role did not execute at all.

Thanks,
Paul

2

There is no direct feature to include vars from a role without executing it. However, it can be achieved if the role is created in a way that provides a noop tasks file. If you use import_role, you can specify tasks_from to tell it to use tasks from that noop file.